Relationship 101

“I am in love – should I make her my girlfriend?”

I have, on multiple occasions, including in the comment sections here at Girls Chase, been asked such a question.

We humans can bond with one another emotionally and experience a stream of emotion that is very intense. We often refer to that experience as love, and, as we know, love is a strong thing.

As you meet women, you will probably meet some you truly like – i.e., some who you would maybe even say you’ve fallen for.

After a while, you pretty much decide to stop doing cold approaches and instead aim to get that one particular girl as your girlfriend.

Such a thing happens to most of us, including Chase and I. I will, in this post, share my opinions on this topic. But keep in mind that you know best what is best for you, and if you believe that trying to get this particular girl to become you girlfriend, no matter what, is an ideal thing for you to do, then you must do whatever floats your boat.

Back in late 2006 and early 2007, I was on an invitation-only social networking site called Late Night Shots. It was a site that allowed those on the Washington, D.C. social scene to “see and be seen” by others – set up profiles, find out where everyone was gathering at, and the like. Sort of a private Facebook for the D.C. socialite crowd.

One of the more interesting features of LNS then was an anonymous message board where people could ask all sorts of dicey questions and give all manner of unbiased, unfiltered replies, since their answers were in no way tied to their profiles or real world identities.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the gossip section of those boards (”Who’s dating whom in the scene?” “What new girl has rocketed to the top of the scene the fastest?”), although it did make for good occasional reading on how different people evaluated social status competitors in the scene (and worked to build up their and others’ reputations, or tear others down through rumors). What interested me more were the various relationship topics that got posed and debated to death.

One of the most frequent of these was the question of “Do women’s pasts matter?”

While nearly all of the female commenters seemed to argue quite vehemently that they didn’t matter one bit, the male commenters were divided right down the middle in their positions: half that they did, half that they didn’t.

Among the half arguing that they didn’t, there was a further divide: the men who didn’t care about women’s pasts because they had no intention of ever ending up in any form of committed long-term relationship... and the men who didn’t care because they legitimately thought a woman’s past had no bearing on her future.

I’d argue that the past matters even in a fling, hookup, or a casual or open relationship... simply because crazy girls can wreck your life in all kinds of terrible ways even when you’re keeping things arms-length with them, and a one-night stand with the wrong kind of girl can quickly turn down Bad News Lane if she fixates on you or brings other bad stuff into your sphere. But what about commitment? How much a woman’s past matter if you want something serious?

As a student of psychology who worked in the field for years, I have arrived at the belief that the single most important predictor of behavior is context. By this, I mean the immediate environment surrounding the behavior – the people, the atmosphere, and all sensory input streams.

I mean, think about it for a second. Doesn’t it sometimes seem like you have a different personality depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing, or where you are? Have you ever done something, then looked back at it later and thought, “That just wasn’t me! I never do stuff like that!”

It’s almost like there was someone else controlling your actions, because the truth of the matter is that... it was a different personality. It was just as much “you” as the “you” you like to think is “you”, but it was simply expressing a side of itself that you had never experienced before. And, if I had to guess, I’d say you were in some kind of special circumstance when that happened… weren’t you? Maybe you were on vacation, maybe you were intoxicated, maybe you were hanging out with people with whom... for some reason, in that instance, it just seemed like an okay thing to do. Right?

So, as with nearly all phenomena I encounter in my journeys and adventures, I asked myself the question... “How can I use what I’ve learned to improve my sex life and the sex lives of my special lady friends?”

Growing up, I was shown again and again in film, books, and television that there was precisely one (1) path a man could follow with women, romantically-speaking: date a few people, find the right girl, and settle down.

This never sat entirely right with me, because while I enjoyed the idea of pairing up intensely with some amazing woman, my tastes also changed enough that I also enjoyed fantasizing about pairing up with lots of different amazing women. Not all at once (what a headache!), but mostly more or less one after another. Maybe having children with the different various amazing women along the way. Even while fixated on that one special girl, I could never imagine more than a year or two out into a relationship with her... sort of like most Hollywood films. The movie in my head always ended after the exciting part.

When I discovered the seduction community, I found two more beliefs about how relationships could go, coexisting rather uncomfortably side-by-side with that first. Plenty of men learning how to get girls still aimed for a settled life with one girl they’d commit to more or less forever; some of them because of a lack of abundance mentality, but many of them because that was just what they really wanted, and the cultural narrative gelled with their own intrinsic desires.

Those other two views on relationships are the ones I want to discuss today. I won’t go much into the conventional mainstream view of relationships – you already know that one plenty well enough (and, for the record, I think it’s a perfectly fine and doable path for those who want it), so instead, I want to talk about the other two:

1. The “Committed Relationships are Bad for Men” View, and
2. The “Committed Relationships are Playgrounds for Men” View

... and I’ll also talk about where both of these views come from, and how and why your lifestyle radically colors your perception of relationships.

Nothing like a contentious topic framed by a loaded question to wake you up and bring out the strong opinions. So here’s one: what’s better, an independent woman... or a submissive one?

If you read “The 4 Kinds of Girls and Which Ones YOU Should Go For”, you’re familiar with both halves of the pie; for the purposes of this article, “soft” = submissive, and “strong” = independent. These are the same things, just described there in more neutral language, and here in more of the language du jour.

In today’s article, we’ll have a look at the merits of both kinds of women – the independent variety, and the submissive variety – and talk about what roles in what men’s lives each are best suited for.

Because while you no doubt have a very strong opinion yourself on which of these two women is “better” and which men should want... I dare say that’s going to vary tremendously from person to person and lifestyle and objectives to lifestyle and objectives.

Colt wrote yesterday on whether women really want to be treated as equals (or not), and it got me thinking about what men on the whole seem to want, and whether that's all that grounded in reality or not.

I talked before about my belief that most of the bitter women men think are out there are really just Internet bitter; in the echo chamber of the World Wide Web, it's pretty easy for one's thoughts to sound like extreme versions of themselves, and it's also very easy to treat others unempathetically, judge, excoriate, and attack, in spiteful ways online that we wouldn't dare do with even our worst enemies live and in person.

When you stop and think about it though, there sure are a whole lot of sensitive people right now ready to respond on a hair trigger with a vicious attack both online and (with a bit more subtlety) in real life, and there's a whole lot of lamenting about where all the "good men" and "good women" have gone, both from men and women. Why?

I'm going to propose here that there is a large undercurrent of wanting more than one's station in life among average men and women, without caring to elevate one's station accordingly. And that that undercurrent of wanting things without doing the requisite things to get them is what drives all this anger, torment, and strife.

It's simply a case of unmet expectations, played out at grand scale society-wide.

Following up my piece yesterday on "The 4 Stages of Every Friends with Benefits Relationship", today I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of running your casual relationships by giving you 8 friends with benefits rules that are absolutely mandatory you follow... to not have everything go to hell in a hand basket, that is.

Friends with benefits are lots of fun, but these relationships are also loaded with the potential to get messy on the turn of a dime. All it takes is a little bending of the rules, and you can very quickly find yourself:

• With a friend with benefits who's falling in love with you

• Falling in love with your friend with benefits yourself

• Experiencing confusion in your social circle about where you stand

• Enjoying reputation damage or drama or other bad effects from things gone awry

Break the rules, and you're playing with fire without a fire extinguisher handy.

Adhere to them, and, well, let's just say you're handling fire in a responsible, fun, and mostly safe way.

So what are these rules you've got to stick to, anyway?